Michael Edwards

Christopher Allen at Life with Alacrity has written an insightful post on group size and dynamics. He specifically looks at size thresholds that act as breakpoints beyond which groups generally have to behave very differently than when they were smaller.

This view of group size dynamics has a lot of potential implications for all kinds of things including management science and more specifically/interesting to me: startup dynamics. Namely, Christopher’s article can be treated as an outline that can be mapped to company size and funding levels, amounts of management required/deployable, liquidity scenarios, etc.

Choice quotes:

…If a community is too small you’ll often have insufficient critical mass to sustain it. Conversely, if it’s too large you can end up with a community that’s too noisy, too cliquey, or otherwise problematic. These optimal and sub-optimal community sizes appear in strata, like discrete layers of rock. For a community to advance from one strata to the next often takes immense energy…

…Clearly, as we step up toward higher group thresholds, more and more time is required to simply keep the group going. You see this in depictions of mafia life — in the TV series The Sopranos a lot of time is spent dining, hanging out, and drinking together. That is part of that 42% social grooming time required for that intense of a survival group…

Tags: community, dunbar number, group size, Sociology, startups

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 12:33 am and is filed under Economics, Sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.